Physical Sciences

Physical Sciences. Sharing a common subject of study—the inanimate universe of matter and energy—the sciences of astronomy, physics, and chemistry also share aspects of a common history. In many instances, these three basic physical sciences even overlap, giving rise to joint disciplines such as astrophysics and chemical physics. Moreover, when viewed in the context of U.S. history, the three sciences' patterns of development tend to synchronize with national social and cultural trends. Despite the shared patterns, however, the three sciences throughout their histories have retained their individuality and nuance as distinct realms of scientific inquiry. In particular, during the early decades of the American republic, practitioners of all three sciences were few in number, isolated from one another, and reliant on European colleagues for direction. By the mid–nineteenth century the physical scientists enjoyed broader public support, clearer professional identities, and more reliable institutional bases, particularly within burgeoning colleges and universities. By the early twentieth century, they had established themselves as full participants—if not leaders—in the international scientific arena, and by midcentury, had added strong links to American government and industry as they expanded their research initiatives and capabilities.

Scientific Colonialism.

During the late Colonial Era and early national period, citizens interested in astronomy, physics, and chemistry found camaraderie and support in a few regional learned societies and colleges. Philadelphia's American Philosophical Society (1743) and Boston's American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1780) fostered scientific study and inquiry, as did early colleges such as Harvard and William and Mary. Working within European frameworks and reflecting an Enlightenment fascination with science's practical and philosophical aspects, a few Americans generated results of an international caliber. In astronomy, Philadelphia's David Rittenhouse (1732–1796) built his own telescopes in 1769 and after for precise celestial observations, while Nathaniel Bowditch contributed to mathematical astronomy and its ties to nautical navigation. In physics—or, as it was then known, natural philosophy—the legacy of Benjamin Franklin and his electrical investigations boosted the young nation's overseas image. Whereas physician Benjamin Rush taught European‐style chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, the English scientist and religious radical Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) brought his trailblazing knowledge of experimental chemistry to America after his emigration to Pennsylvania in 1794.

Although presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams championed government support of scientific projects, parsimonious and constitutionally sensitive members of Congress objected. Furthermore, while colleges proliferated during the Antebellum Era, they tended to teach astronomy, physics, and chemistry as merely accoutrements of a liberal education. Original scientific research, whether directed toward practical applications or arcane theories, still originated with self‐motivated individual investigators who faced substantial constraints, including burdensome teaching loads, a scarcity of apparatus and materials, and insufficient access to the primary international practitioners, societies, and journals. To be sure, astronomers enjoyed an advantage because of a national flurry of observatory building—including the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., completed in 1844. But physicist Joseph Henry and chemist‐naturalist Benjamin Silliman were more typical of the American self‐initiating, self‐reliant investigator. With minimal technical resources, Henry still matched wits with his European counterparts in the new field of electromagnetism, while Silliman bolstered scientifically minded compatriots by publishing the only consequential national outlet for research, the interdisciplinary American Journal of Science.

Professionalism.

As the nineteenth century proceeded, physical scientists moved into an era of heightened professionalism and increased specialization. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (1848) and National Academy of Sciences (1863) provided institutional support and a sense of community. The Smithsonian Institution (1846), under Joseph Henry's direction, served as a clearinghouse for the nation's scattered scientists. Near the end of the century, the physical scientists carved out separate disciplinary organizations and specialized journals: the American Astronomical Society and the Astronomical Journal; the American Physical Society and the Physical Review; and, with the largest outreach, the American Chemical Society and its Journal.

Through two midcentury institutions—Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School and Yale's Sheffield Scientific School—astronomers, physicists, and chemists trained a new generation of experts in these three often overlapping disciplines. Jobs opened for these scientists at technically oriented land‐grant colleges and universities, mandated by Congress in the 1862 Morrill Land Grant Act. By the 1880s, American educational institutions such as the new Johns Hopkins University (1876) were awarding doctoral degrees in the sciences, thus lessening the need for aspiring researchers to study abroad, as had been the pattern. Although a few physical scientists had found employment in early federal agencies such as the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey and the Nautical Almanac Office, the government expanded job opportunities by creating new science‐oriented divisions such as the National Bureau of Standards and the Department of Agriculture. Physical scientists also gained support from private foundations such as the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Physicists and particularly chemists (along with chemical engineers) also found positions in medicine and industry, especially the electrical industry. Increasingly these scientists provided not merely technical assistance but also worked in industrial research laboratories underwritten by corporations such as American Telephone and Telegraph, General Electric, DuPont, and Eastman Kodak. The physical scientists who enjoyed these expanding professional opportunities were overwhelmingly male and white. Except for a scattering of female astronomers, women and minorities had little representation in the physical sciences throughout the nineteenth century.

Enjoying increased support and expanded resources in the later nineteenth century, a still small but growing number of American physical scientists gained international prominence. Simon Newcomb of Johns Hopkins led the way in astronomy with mathematical studies of lunar and planetary orbits. In physics, Henry Rowland of Johns Hopkins and Albert A. Michelson of the University of Chicago broke new ground with experiments on diffraction gratings and interferometer studies of light waves—the latter helping earn Michelson the first Nobel Prize awarded to an American scientist (1907). Although the chemists greatly outnumbered the astronomers and physicists, their ranks included fewer luminaries. The chemists, however, gained recognition not only in basic research but also in practical applications: Charles M. Hall, for example, produced cheap aluminum through electrolysis. Josiah Willard Gibbs bridged physics and chemistry with innovations in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics—and, in the process, by concentrating on abstract theory, complemented his colleagues' propensity for experiment and measurement.

International Parity.

In the early twentieth century, American physical scientists achieved strength in numbers, funding, and performance comparable to that of their European counterparts. They now occupied positions in universities, industries, private foundations, and state and federal governments. The tie to the federal government strengthened during World War I through both the Chemical Warfare Service and the National Research Council (NRC). The council, organized by astrophysicist George Ellery Hale and later directed by physicist Robert A. Millikan, coordinated a successful series of military research projects. Earlier, Hale had shown the advantages of centralized, large‐scale, cooperative research by building successively bigger and more costly telescopes at the Yerkes and Mount Wilson observatories and later the even more ambitious Mount Palomar Observatory. Indeed, through the observatories and the NRC, Hale blazed the trail for the “big science” of the 1930s and 1940s. The University of California physicist Ernest O. Lawrence, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1939, reinforced the trend by building progressively more powerful and expensive cyclotrons. Collaborating with chemists such as his Berkeley colleague Glenn T. Seaborg (1912–1999), Lawrence used these particle accelerators to generate radioisotopes (often with medical applications) and, eventually, transuranium elements (including plutonium).

In the period between 1920 and 1940, American physical scientists assimilated such radical new theories as special and general relativity, quantum mechanics, and nuclear science. Applying these new perspectives to cosmological issues (such as stellar evolution, galactic structure, and expansion of the universe) were astronomers Henry N. Russell, Harlow Shapley, and Edwin P. Hubble. Physicists who tackled quantum complexities included Arthur Compton and the team of Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer. Chemist Linus Pauling clarified the significance of quantum theory for chemical bonds. The arrival in the 1930s of immigrants escaping persecution in Europe reinforced these various investigations. George Gamow and Peter J.W. Debye, for example, drew on the new theories to explore the interfaces of astronomy, physics, and chemistry. Albert Einstein's emigration to America in 1933 further bolstered the already high international standing not merely of physics in the United States but of all the physical sciences.

Ties to Government and Industry.

During World War II, physicists and chemists worked with engineers on a wide range of war‐related projects. Often through contracts with industries or universities, the military funded a series of crash programs to develop devices such as radar and the proximity fuse, to refine armaments such as incendiary weapons and solid‐propellant rockets, and to produce synthetic versions of scarce materials such as rubber and fuel. Although all of these front‐line technologies helped assure the Allies' victory, the atomic bomb (utilizing the recent discovery of nuclear fission) was the scientists' most dramatic and ultimately crucial undertaking. The Manhattan Project, the war's most ambitious and expensive scientific and engineering enterprise, brought together the leading native‐born and immigrant physical scientists, who not only overcame the problems of producing fissionable uranium and plutonium, but also assumed the lead in designing the actual bombs. The success of the Manhattan Project, so dramatically demonstrated by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, helped rally the nation's political, military, industrial, and scientific leaders to the idea of federally funded big science. This idea informed the postwar creation of such scientific giants as the Atomic Energy Commission (1946) and the National Science Foundation (1950), both initially dominated by Manhattan Project veterans.

During the second half of the twentieth century, big science flourished at major facilities structured around nuclear weapons (as hydrogen or fusion bombs superseded the original atomic or fission bombs), nuclear reactors, magnetic fusion reactors, particle accelerators, and radio telescopes. These facilities included Argonne National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) similarly fostered astronomical research into pulsars, quasars, black holes, and other celestial oddities through various lunar and planetary probes, satellites to detect x‐rays and other emissions, and the Hubble Space Telescope. Smaller, less expensive research initiatives also flourished, particularly in academic and industrial settings, and especially for chemists. Narrower networks of researchers, for example, pioneered the transistor and the laser and helped detect residual cosmic effects from the Big Bang, the primal event astrophysicists hypothesize as the origin of the knowable universe. In the sprawling and diverse community of chemical scientists, local researchers continued to use versatile instruments such as mass spectrometers to make breakthroughs in fields ranging from medicine to agriculture.

End of the Twentieth Century and Beyond.

The generation of physical scientists who led the Manhattan Project and kindred wartime endeavors dominated American scientific policy—in all fields—through at least the 1960s. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, however, the influence of this aging generation eroded as Americans reevaluated the nation's scientific priorities. The erosion quickened with the end of the Cold War and the growing prominence of such life‐science fields as molecular biology, genetics and genetic engineering, and medical research. “Accountability” and “relevance” became the new bywords of American science. Physicists were particularly affected by the resultant national reallocation of resources, facing diminished or no funding for an ambitious space‐weapons project (the Strategic Defense Initiative) and a gargantuan particle accelerator. Physics was also more affected by an ongoing problem: the underrepresentation of women and, to an even greater degree, African Americans and Hispanic Americans. Despite recurrent corrective campaigns, physicists in particular—but also astronomers and chemists—achieved only modest improvements in establishing gender and racial balance.

Even as they adjusted to changing national priorities, however, the physical scientists maintained commanding positions in international research arenas as the century ended. Their achievements ranged, as they had throughout the nation's history, from the highly esoteric to the immediately practical—from probing the cosmological theory of an expanding universe to developing the medical tool of magnetic‐resonance imaging (MRI). Whether working in academic, industrial, or governmental settings—and whether allied with one another, with life scientists, or with engineers—American astronomers, physicists, and chemists continued to extend the bounds of scientific inquiry.
See also Agricultural Experiment Stations; Biological Sciences; Chemical Industry; Earth Sciences; Education: Collegiate Education; Education: The Rise of the University; Education: Education in Contemporary America; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of Agriculture; Mathematics and Statistics; Nuclear Power; Oppenheimer, J. Robert; Professionalization; Rabi, Isidor I.; Science; Space Program; Technology; Teller, Edward.

Bibliography

Daniel J. Kevles , The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America, 1977.
Daniel J. Kevles , The Physics, Mathematics, and Chemistry Communities: A Comparative Analysis, in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860–1920, eds., Alexandra Oleson and John Voss, 1979, pp. 139–72.
Albert E. Moyer , American Physics in Transition: A History of Conceptual Change in the Late Nineteenth Century, 1983.
Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Margaret W. Rossiter, eds., Historical Writing on American Science: Perspectives and Prospects, 1985.
Arnold Thackray et al. , Chemistry in America, 1876–1976, 1985.
John W. Servos , Mathematics and the Physical Sciences in America, 1880–1930, Isis 77 (1986): 611–629.
John W. Servos , Physical Chemistry from Ostwald to Pauling: The Making of a Science in America, 1990.
Ronald E. Doel , Solar System Astronomy in America: Communities, Patronage, and Interdisciplinary Research, 1920–1960, 1996.
John Lankford , American Astronomy: Community, Careers, and Power, 1859–1940, 1997.

Albert E. Moyer